


Vetch and Rampion

by handschuhmaus



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anakin finally gets to cry, Angst and Fluff and Crack, Father-Daughter Relationship, Father-Son Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Fluffy Ending, Fractured Fairy Tale, Gen, I didn't intend for this to have so much Anakin in it but. it. does., Sith hugs, but it turns out well here ok?, don't actually entrust Sith with infants honestly, men having full emotional ranges, this is definitely a Sith redemption fic and not just for Anakin
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-01
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-07-04 12:15:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15841107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handschuhmaus/pseuds/handschuhmaus
Summary: Anakin makes an ineffable trade: the child Leia for the lives of Padme, and, it turns out, Luke.No one reckoned on the Emperor finding himself relatively purposeless for the first time in years and in possession of a small child.





	Vetch and Rampion

The man who had been Anakin Skywalker looked dead inside as he handed a sloppily wrapped bundle to the now disfigured and recently promoted Emperor of the Galaxy. Unable to look at his mentor and patron, he trudged away numbly, to return to his unresponsive wife and newborn son.

He had just sacrificed the life of the daughter he had been so fond of since first feeling her kick in the womb for the life of Padme, and the unexpected son _she_ had wanted. He couldn't fathom how Shmi would have regarded the trade, had she been around. But his hardened heart thudded rapidly in his ears with the guilt his Jedi training had imbued upon the thought of missing her. Maybe he'd gotten away enough to have a family, but the years of denial of that urge had left a stain upon him. An ugly stain, that he connected with the murderous urges with which he had avenged his mother.

And, said a quiet voice in his head that sounded uncomfortably like Obi-Wan Kenobi, the infanticidal trade you just made.

* * *

For his part, Palpatine recalled, without fondness, the last time he had been handed a baby. But... a life for a life. It had been the only sensible price. 

And it was a) a Skywalker and b) thoroughly human, such that there would be no worries about passing it off as well...not his child specifically (especially considering he now was possessed of a face his mother certainly wouldn't have loved, as marginally as she had considered him when alive) but a relative. 

A relative the _kriffing Emperor_ of the Galaxy had taken in, in a gesture not entirely befitting of his new post. His face twisted into a wry smirk. Sometimes, Palpatine (he thought), you're too kind for your own well-being.

* * *

A child needs a nursery. 

Anakin and Padme, in the turmoil, had been unable to solidify plans and the reality of their child ~~ren~~ enough to create one, so Anakin did it alone now, in between visits to Padme's bedside and three a.m. bottle feedings when father and son both wept unabashedly, for mothers and lost sister and the slight chill of the unforgiving world outside the womb, and how a boy, a man, could trade the glory of heroics for the mundane mess and heartache of this life the three of them were living. 

He got the crib items all in the shades of the desert, the desert he hoped Luke would never know, and realised at some point, while assembling the frame after a nearly sleepless night, that this, perhaps, was how he would finally mourn Shmi Skywalker, properly, by emulating her in raising a son, and by giving him the birthright of a child of the desert.

But he drew and painted lush green trees and water waves on the wall. With Padme sick, and so still, Anakin, always one to tinker, could barely stand to have his hands still. For the same urge, Obi-Wan had once taught him to stitch cloth from string as Shmi never had (he learned later it was Qui-Gon Jinn's skill, from the man's home planet: a furtive, snatched heritage). He tried not to think of the man he had, in his own head, called brother, as he stitched the blue of water into soft waves to wrap Luke in, with shaky hands and bleary, sleepless one a.m. eyes. 

They said women sometimes got depressed after giving birth. But Padme was not depressed but dreadfully stilled, and Anakin could not, would not, be entirely still, for he could not bear the idea of the weight of everything crushing him, as he was sure would happen without the near-constant movement.

* * *

Palpatine had entirely different and almost justifiable reasons for not having a nursery prepared. To wit, 1) the plan he had executed had only fallen together as it happened 2) he had not even quite intuited previously that children were involved, and 3) he had not intended to ask for one, practically until he had.

Palpatine, the man, did not especially like nurseries. They had been a zone to which he was confined with younger siblings too many times for his own taste, and they had never much appealed to his sensibilities. The only one he had previously had a hand in creating had been for the purpose of raising up a Sith apprentice, and a Zabrak at that.

(In retrospect he was not sure he should have adhered to the recommendations of either the woman who entrusted him with the child who was Maul or Plagueis. The one lived a hard life in a society that had not adopted, or perhaps been afforded, his beloved creature comforts and artistry. The other was a confirmed bachelor and an only child who tended to dispense parenting advice while inebriated. Furthermore, while finally dealing with Darth Plagueis's effects, long after the Muun's death at his hand, Palpatine had realised that said parenting advice had been thoroughly mixed up with ethically questionable instructions for care of lab animals.)

All the same, despite Anakin Skywalker's notion of the transaction, it was not Palpatine's intention to kill or traumatize the child, so a nursery it was. He ordered a rocking chair painted luridly with lush pink roses of various sorts, the sort of kitschy thing he would never have admitted to liking otherwise. And music--supposedly music was good for infant brain development, and it might just, proverbially, soothe his child-troubled soul a smidge.

There was a simple cradle, above which he stuck a mobile of colorful geometric shapes his assistant had accidentally ordered by transposing two digits of an item number. Also supposed to be good for brain development. (This was the child of a skilled mechanic: it would probably have an innate talent for spatial reasoning.)

The walls he had painted green (as Anakin had, actually), with a large mural of letters and shapes. (educational, and green was supposed to be soothing, wasn't it?) He had some reluctance to be fond of the child--look at Maul, and Cosinga whose blood ran in his veins. But this was Anakin's child (Anakin who Palpatine was most definitely fond of) and even Padme Nabarrie had been quite an acceptable child. It would have a stuffed creature to hug--a feline with soft and realistic fur. Even if such a comfort was denied the Jedi and had been discouraged in his childhood home.

And finally, in what he would excuse to himself as a fit of pique, he looked into the small, unfocused dark blue eyes and felt something that justified occupying the daily hour or two he spent by the crib in the rocking chair in knitting the child a blanket over the first month and a half, although he told himself it was an extended swatching experiment, in a soft natural gray wool that turned out a little like the fantasy of touching a solid rain cloud.

This was not, he realized, really an action befitting an emperor. All the same, it seemed more helpful than the other political machinations he might be inclined to preform.

* * *

A Jedi appeared in Luke's nursery one night, as the nearly sleeping infant cuddled into the soft folds of blue blanket on his father's lap and Anakin tried to sob as quietly as possible, so as not to disturb the baby's sleep. It was only here with Luke that he felt he could stay still.

Or rather, the ghost of a Jedi appeared. Qui-Gon Jinn looked much the same in death as in life. "Anakin," he said gently, and Luke's eyes sprang open.

"What do you _want_?" Anakin demanded. All his desperation had gotten him little enough, with Padme laying silent and still in a hospital bed, but also the most precious things he had ever had, and he had kept only one of them, only Luke, squandering the life of their daughter (that he'd so wanted) for the sake of her ailing mother and unexpected twin. What was it to be family to Anakin Skywalker, to be perpetually endangered by his dangerous personality?

"Is this your son? He is a beautiful baby," said Qui-Gon and bent to tickle Luke's belly with ethereal fingers.

"That's not why you're here," Anakin accused the ghost with dangerous calm.

"I did not mean for this to happen," Qui-Gon pronounced, enigmatic. His eyes turned deeply sad.

"And I'll bet you didn't mean to die and have to leave me to Obi-Wan either. But if wishes were water..." Anakin broke off and sobbed anew, wasting moisture, so plentiful here, over his cheeks.

When he looked up again, the ghost was gone.

* * *

Sidious's thoughts wandered one night onto the child (now his, entirely from care and not blood, although they were probably distant cousins of a sort on the Nabarrie side) and her suitability for Sith training. For she was a girl, and the daughter of petite Padme, and so likely would not be the physically strongest of people. But some of that depended on training, and anyway it would be alright, considering that he was wiry and not the strongest of humans himself. If pure physical prowess were a Sith requirement, Plagueis, for instance, probably wouldn't have been one.

It suddenly occurred to him that he had not asked for her as his future apprentice or... for any real reason. She was Anakin's child and she kicked her tiny feet with tiny perfect toenails and grasped his finger. 

Babies, he realized with chilling suddeness, would accept whoever took care of them, so long as they did, without considering their other actions or sentiments. And sometimes, yes, that led to woeful circumstances for children. His own family, for instance. He had far more absolute power over this small child (Anakin's small child!) than he had over any other person, despite his position as emperor.

Yet by some latent instinct, and not being constantly egged on by Plagueis or a need to prove himself, all he actively wished to do with ...Leia was to care to for her and watch her adorable baby antics.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...this basic plotline, which resembles a twist on Rapunzel (hence "rampion", a commoner name for the plant, in the title) has been in my mind for oh... years. Like somewhere I should still have a beginning (with more oc's and less Anakin) of such a story from 2014...
> 
> anyway, edited 9/1 my time (p sure I published it yesterday but it's not been a very clearly delineated set of days so maybe the date I'm looking at was right) purely for reasons of getting wordcount to work... and, what the heck, adding this note.


End file.
